![]() Wilde took a first class defree in Classical Moderations at Oxford in 1876. He won the Berkeley Gold Medal for his essay on the Greek comic poets in 1874. He took his poetry seriously enough to physically assault a fellow student at Trinity College who had ridiculed one of his compositions. Oscar had written poems since he was a child and had begun to publish them at university. ![]() However, some of the warders were genuinely kind to Oscar and held him in great steem He helped them to enter newspaper competitions and even managed to win a grand piano for one of them in one such contest. Oscar was sentenced to hard labour and initially his punishment and humiliation caused a signiricant deterioration in his health. However he didn?t escape, partly because his mother told him that she would stand by him if he ?faced the music? (accept critiscism for his actions), but that she would never speak to him again if he fled. When Oscar was convicted under the homosexuality acts of 1885, he was given time to flee the country. However, his decision turned to obsession when his eldest son committed suicide, probably because he was being bklackmailed over a homosexual relationship, and when his wife filed for divorce on the grounds of the Marquess?s impotence. His determination to destroy Wilde started when he discovered that the artist was having a relationship with his son Alfred (Bosie). His downfall was provoked by the Marquess of Queensberry, a militant atheist who had been expelled from the House of Lords for rabid antireligious diatribes. Nobody escept a few brave artists wanted to know him after his release from prison in 1897. The extent of his downfall can only be gauged from a list of those who had been pleased to make his acquaintance and hear his brilliant conversation before 1895: Queen Victoria, Yeats, the Bishop of London, Prince of Wales, etc. It was not until 1886 that Oscar started experimenting with his homosexual side. At university his activities were entirely heterosexual, at Oxfor Oscar caught syphilis from a local girl. However, this was quite a common (though admitedly strange) superstitious custom at the time. Those in search of precocious signs of homosexuality will no doubt point to a photograph of his as a young boy, dressed as a girl. His sexual activities were to bring about his downfall and this tends to colour our vision of his early life. He greatly enjoyed meeting the Pope in 1877 and kissing the Papal Ring but open conversion at this stage would have created family problems. Despite his protestant upbringing and schooling, he was attracted by Catholicism for its magnificence and solemnity as well as its theatrical bells and smells (music and incense). While at university Oscar went on several group trips to the Continent. With minimal effort Oscar fot a couble first from Oxford, the highest qualification available. It was Pater who imbued Wilde with the values of aestheticism and ? art for art?s sake?. At the English university, Oscar?s intellect was stimulated by two particularly gifted dons: John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Fermanagh and Trinity College, Dublin, and then Magdalen College, Oxford. Despite doing a minimal amount of schoolwork, Oscar?s hothouse family meant that he breezed into Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Jane wrote under the nom de plume of Speranza, and was one of that strange 19 th century breed: an Irish nationalist protestant. His mother was an incendiary poetess, who believed that he was descended from Dante. His father, Sir William Wilde, was an illustrious figure in Dublin, and archaeologist, ehtnologist, antiquarian, biographer, statistician, naturalist, topographer, historian and folklorist, and the Queen?s surgeon oculist. ![]() Oscar Wilde?s origins were neither obscure nor ordinary. Oscar Fiongal O?Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 15 th October 1854.
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